GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin

NOTE: If you start getting spam, change the “secret key” to any really long set of random letters and numbers (no special characters) and save it. Each time you change it the hackers have to start trying to break in again. It can take them hours to days to do that. You can change this as often as necessary to keep them out.

We are absolutely thrilled and relieved that our spam problems are over. We went from 1000+ spam comments a day to not a single automated spam comment at all. Logging in to see only 12-50 real comments left by real people who have no problems commenting any more is a joy.

With the custom GrowMap anti-spambot plugin Andy Bailey from CommentLuv wrote based on an idea from Phil Hollows of FeedBlitz and improved by a suggestion from Dazzlin Donna Fontenot you can too!

IMPORTANT !!!

UPDATE: I finally had to turn off pingbacks and trackbacks in
both WordPress under discussions and in CommentLuv Premium.
If you use the free version, turn them off in GASP.
Doing this will block many more automated comments.

NEW: If you suddenly get an influx of spam and trackback spam
while using GASP and Simple Trackback Validationcheck
for errors in the STV plugin or delete, re-upload & reintall it.
Spammers have found a way to hack that plugin.

This plugin plus a trackback blocker and the blacklist function
built into WordPress provides a complete anti-spam solution.

The plugin is already installed in all of our blogs plus all of Murray Newland‘s blogs, at Influence People and in dozens of our closest collaborators’ blogs too. The blogs range from WordPress 2.9.1 to 3.0.1 and we have run into no conflicts or problems installing it or running it in any blog so far.

If you are using our plugin please visit the GrowMap Anti-Spam WordPress plugin page and indicate that it works so that bloggers who do not know us will know to trust it. Thank you.

This plugin would not exist if it were not for the tenacity of the fine folks at Linda Christas College who kept explaining why how we are allowing our commentators to be treated was rude and especially bad for business blogs.

I am embarrassed to admit that even I did not clearly understand for too long, but once I did I found they were absolutely correct. We simply can not allow our readers and commentators to be sent to a blank white page, have their comments immediately deleted before we even see them, or to not receive a message that their comment is being moderated.

The plugin blocks BOTS not human spammers. If you have a problem with comments that look like comments but are actually trackback spam see Justin Germino’s post about the plugin we’re all using to block trackback spam.

Manually created spam can be blocked by WordPress by adding the url, email address or words to the blacklist function built into WordPress. Log into WordPress and go to Settings > Discussion > Comment Blacklist and type or paste what you want to blacklist into that box.

Comments captured by the blacklist go to the spam section of your comments.

NOTE: “When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be marked as spam. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”.”

Be careful not to block comments containing words that have parts of other words within them and do check your spam folder and rescue good comments. If you realize you’re blocking a word you can edit the blacklist.

1) NOTE: Be sure to read the readme file about installing the plugin. You will NOT see the check box if you are logged in. Additional details:

The checkbox only appears for logged out users.
If you’re logged out, it only shows if you have javascript enabled.
If you are logged out and have javascript enabled and it is still not showing then you need to have the comment form action active in your comments.php theme file
` do_action(‘comment_form’,$post->ID); `

2) Why Use the GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin?

No false positives – your favorite commentators and new readers WILL be able to easily comment in your blog.

Blocks spam that Akismet was letting through. We are getting ZERO bot spam. Only those commenting manually who check the “I am not a spammer box” can leave comments.

Easier for commentators than using a Captcha or math plugin – never a “wrong” answer that isn’t wrong or a problem with cookies!

Reviews of GrowMap Anti-SpamBot Plugin on other blogs (There are so many that it will take time for me to compile them all. Coming as soon as time allows.)

4) What if my readers and commentators do not have JavaScript enabled?

While most Internet users today DO have Javascript enabled, there is a GASP PHP version created by Doug Neubauer that can be coded into your blog if you have technical skills.

5) What if I want to move the position of the Check Box??

The checkbox will appear wherever the do_action(‘comment_form’,$post->ID); command in their themes comments.php . It is that command that tells WordPress plugins that the comment form is being rendered to the page and any plugins that want to add something to the form should do it now. If they want to move it, they need to edit their comments.php file and move that command (it should not be outside the <form> </form> tags and needs to be enclosed in <?php ?> tags if it isn’t already part of some php block)

6) Why Not Just Use Akismet?

Large numbers of bloggers and regular commentators who never spam have been flagged by Akismet as spammers.

Any commentator who has been flagged as a spammer is treated rudely by your blog. They never see the message your comment is being moderated so they have no way of knowing what happened to their comment.

If you have a particular box checked in the Akismet configuration, comments left for real people who have been flagged incorrectly as commentators in posts more than 30 days old are immediately deleted and they see a blank white page. See how to turn off Akismet Comment deletion.

Read the many other posts and hundreds of comments related to problems with Akismet.

7) Why We Stopped Using Captchas and the Math Plugin:

Even when your commentators enter the captcha or math solution correctly they are sometimes told they have entered it incorrectly.

We had three complaints from regular commentators who are experienced bloggers within 48 hours of testing. If they don’t know that deleting cookies will probably resolve the problems of incorrect answers neither will your ordinary readers.

They can be difficult for older people and those with poor vision to read.

8) Why We Don’t Recommend Using Bad Behavior:

We tested the Bad Behavior plugin and it behaved very badly, locking all three admins out of this blog. Even after using ftp to remove the plugin we were unable to log in. It took input from five top collaborators with very advanced WordPress skills to find and remove all the files necessary to recover from that test. Most bloggers do not know that many WP experts who have that kind of skills. Some have had to resort to reloading their blogs to recover.

Thanks to all the bloggers who have commented on using G.A.S.P. and are promoting it in their own blogs.

9) G.A.S.P. VERSIONS:

There is a changelog section in the WordPress page for every plugin that indicates what changes with each version. The original version worked fine; however, there have been significant improvements since then:

0.4 added the warning suggested by Dazzlin Donna Fontenot that pops up a message if you forget to check the box. That eliminated the problem of possibly losing your comment if you forget.

1.01 resolved a problem that the plugin did not work with some custom Themes (identified by Dragonblogger).

Before 1.02 the plugin blocked trackbacks and pingbacks. Ileane noticed that and asked that they be unblocked.

Some bloggers including Dragonblogger are plagued by spam trackbacks / pingbacks so he did not like the 1.02 change. In response, Andy created 1.04 which allows each blogger to either block or allow all trackbacks and pingbacks. Dragonblogger suggests using another plugin to filter those if you have a problem with pingback or trackback spam.

Thanks also to all of our other collaborators who assisted in testing and these bloggers who are using this plugin:

Ari Herzog @AriHerzog on Why he switched to our Akismet replacement

Karen @Blazing Minds calls GASP Plugin “a MUST for any blogger”

Cynthia Pedrosa The Game of Life Blog, Mobile Themes Designer know as @zeolyte on DeviantARTand z3olyte11 of The Game of Life.

Gail Gardner is the founder of GrowMap.com. She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist she mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers.
After 23 years in the field with IBM and 5.5 years managing AdWords accounts, her focus shifted to small business marketing strategy. GrowMap.com is listed by Cision as a Top 100 Site for Marketers and has received three Small Business Influencer Awards from Small Business Trends. Named by D&B a Top 50 SMB Influencer on Twitter, you can follow Gail @GrowMap and on LinkedIn.

I was a user of G.A.S.P. for a long time but I became concerned when I saw that it was no longer being updated. It now hasn’t seen an update for over 2 years.

I also see that CommentLuv appears to have now gone the same way, with no updates for almost a year. The official site is dead, support is dead and questions on its support page on the WordPress.org forum aren’t being replied to.

Is it still viable to use these plugins or has Andy abandoned them do you know? It would be a shame if it’s the latter, especially CommentLuv, as there’s nothing else out there that does quite what this does and I would hate to have to stop using it.

Andy has M.S. and was doing what he could to keep them updated. But he hasn’t posted now for a long time and no one has heard from him. His ComLuv site is gone. Unless he has a miraculous recovery or makes arrangements for someone else to take his plugins over, we may have to just use them as long as they keep working.

One thing to remember is to use the secret key and change it regularly. Any time you start seeing spam, change that to a very long string or random numbers and letters (no special characters). That is what keeps the spammers out.

So far, CommentLuv Premium which has GASP built in has continued to work with each WordPress update. We are hoping it will keep working. I’ll ask around and see if other plugin developers can update it if that becomes necessary.Gail Gardner would love you to read ..What You Need to Think About When Building Your WordPress Site

Thanks for the replying with that info. I did actually know that Andy suffers from MS, so I I assumed that the lack of updates, etc on his part was due to this. But I believe that someone else had been handling work on it in more recent times, although he seems to have disappeared.

What I have just noticed, though, is that CommentLuv is open source – I never realised that. So if we could find someone to take up the torch (unfortunately, plugin coding is currently outside my skill set) then that would be fantastic.

For me, the thing about continuing to use it as it is, is I get nervous about using plugins that haven’t been updated for many months, simply from a security standpoint. But hopefully we’ll be able to get someone interested enough to take it on. I’ll certainly keep my eyes and ears open and ask around.

We have Andy Bailey from CommentLuv to thank for the GASP plugin. I couldn’t stand all the bot spam I was getting – over 960 a day until he coded this plugin. Now I get 0 botspam. It is truly a blessing.Gail Gardner would love you to read ..How to Use Twitter Advanced Search Like a Pro

That’s a good question. I’ll have to try to figure out why it is showing and what generates it. Because I use GASP that is built into CommentLuv Premium, I’m not sure what the free plugin status is anymore. WordPress shows it hasn’t been updated in 2 years; however, CommentLuv (the free version) shows it has been updated 3 weeks ago.

CommentLuv Premium has been updated in the past year, but I don’t know whether the GASP portion had any changes. I still see the checkbox on many sites, but most serious bloggers who use CommentLuv have the Premium version. I’ll DM Andy and see if he can tell me.Gail Gardner would love you to read ..Bloggers Hiring Bloggers: Kinds of Work You Outsource or Get Hired to Do

GASP is one of the most useful plugins that I’ve been using on all of my WordPress blogs to prevent spam. Thanks a lot for keeping this plugin free and letting use secure our WordPress blogs from spammers 🙂

I have successfully activated the plug in. However it doesn\’t apply on my contact form and JAVA is enabled. Please can someone help me? I\’ve tried loggin out and it still doesn\’t appear on the form. ThanksEmma

Yes, changed themes. Darn. I’m now getting a TON of spam but I am not willing to change my theme because I love what I now have. I’ve been using your plug-in for years 🙁Mel would love you to read ..Free and Discounted Books January 26

I don’t know much about G.A.S.P, using askminet earlier, will use and check how much effective it is, actually there are some issues with askminet, hope GASP will solve itcyclingworldmag would love you to read ..Ride With Vision

Is this really necessary? I am using the SEO WordPress plugin by Yoast including Cloudflare but was informed by Yoast some time ago not to install the CloudFlare plugin.Philip would love you to read ..Satellite Direct Review

Are you sure you’re talking about the GrowMap anti-spambot plugin? This blog runs the version of GASP that is built into CommentLuv. It blocks most bots, but unfortunately some spammers do leave comments. I’m testing changing the random number daily using a very long string in hopes it will take so long for them to crack it that they can’t get in.

You might want to check out these links for additional protection. One mentions using CloudFlare.

I gave up on the GASP and the whole lot of 5-7 plugins tied to trying to combat web SPAM. Now I simply let Impermium do all the work and there is no moderation time spent weeding through the junk and having to get the swirly white space page when making comments.

If Impernium relies on crowdsourced reporting of spam it will have the same problem Akismet does – it will block or blacklist all the best commenters so they will stop reading, commenting and sharing your blog posts.

It is easy to do away with spam – just turn off comments. It is easy to eliminate moderating quality comments – use a solution that blocks all their comments. Good luck with that.growmap would love you to read ..For Bloggers Who Hate Comment Spam

I had used Akismet previously, but was not happy with it. It did not work reliably. Then I switched to G.A.S.P., and all my spam problems disappeared instantly. First I still got a lot of trackback and pingback spam, but then I saw that I can turn that off in the settings of the plugin. I guess the only issue is that in this way I cannot see if I get some good, non-spam trackbacks, but that is not a big deal for me compared to having to go through dozens of trackbacks and pingbacks manually every day.Shama Kern would love you to read ..What Exactly is Thai Healing Massage?

You can’t completely get rid of it, but this plugin does stop all the bots and Andy has even added new methods for stopping the new automated Trackback Spam plugins. You can’t really stop the real people who manually leave spam effectively, but they can only type so fast. It is the computer generated spam that is the greatest part of the problem. When this plugin became available I was getting 1000+ spam a day here and it blocked ~960 of them. That only left me 40 a day to deal with and most of those were real comments – not spam.

Spammers have been such a headache for bloggers that most equate any link to a business with spam. I’ve been working to change that perception. Please read my post For Bloggers Who Hate Comment Spam.

But strangely on one of them it doesn’t seem to work: on that blog one post (and always the same post by the way) just keep getting spam. And at the rate I receive them, I suspect it’s from bots. It’s just on one blog..and one post only! Very strange, any idea?Nathalie would love you to read ..Buying and Selling Squidoo Lenses

Hello,
I just installed GrowMap along with CommentLuv.
Please excuse if this question sounds dumb, but should I deactivate Akismet or it is still needed by your plugin?
By the way, excellent plugin as it makes a very strong case for attracting legitimate posters that don’t want to experience frustration when posting.
Many Thanks!

I had to chuckle at the …~ Why we don’t recommend using bad behavior~ headline. It should be self-evident.

Those who are fortunate to have a blog that spammers consider worthy of their efforts have passed the first test. It is important that these bloggers walk the fine line…thwart the spammers, but welcome genuine comments. Thanks for sharing this valuable information.David Sneen would love you to read ..Raises –Traditional vs. Earn More Spend More Group

I’m glad you got it figured out. That sounds similar to the issue with sharing buttons. You may notice that it is best to put sharing buttons (like the ones found at the top of my posts) only on the individual posts and NOT so that they appear on the main page that contains your most recent posts.growmap would love you to read ..Are YOUR 2012 Small Business Goals All Wrong?

With the assistance of my readers we have identified what got through and sent the details to Andy so he can change the plugin to lock them back out again.

I will consult with an attorney who specializes in Internet law to see if there is any way to legally go after spammers who intentionally hack plugins that spam our blogs.growmap would love you to read ..Small Business Internet Marketing: Where to Start

I have been regularly reading big bloggers and after reading so many great stuff about this plugin, I have installed it on all my blogs. I like it and will be using it always. Looking forward to any updates or potential new features of the plugin 🙂

That is a very good question that no one has asked me before. I know that there is a way to use CommentLuv with IntenseDebate and the new CommentLuv Premium has GASP built in but I will have to ask Andy if free GASP works with IntenseDebate or not.

I’ll begin by saying that I’m really excited to discover this plugin. I actually showed up at your site looking to get a do-follow comment link. I spend a lto of time doing this because I actually read the posts and then formulate something to contribute that it on-topic. When I read this post I’ve super-excited because I’ve been worried about the Akismet slip-ups on my various WordPress blogs and this seems to address it in some way. I do have two questions though:

1) CommentLuv Only? – is this plugin specifically designed to work if you’re running the CommentLuv plugin, or can you use it on any WordPress Installation?

2) What does this plugin do to differentiate people from bots? – I noticed the checkbox when I left a previous comment on a different post, but is that all there is to keeping the spammers away? I’m guessing there’s more to it because all they would need to do is adjust their software to check the box, right?

Add me to your list of happy campers! I’ve been using it for almost two months now and haven’t had any spam. It’s a joy for readers who comment. Thank you so much! Having to wade through spam to delete it was the bane of my life.

does the plugin purely put the ‘check the box if you’re human’ checkbox in the form? isn’t there a danger that bots can evolve to simply check all boxes in a form or even look for ‘check if you’re human’ type questions?
What if the box was ‘uncheck if you’re human’ or even better alternated from ‘check if you’re human’ to ‘uncheck if you’re human’ seemingly randomly (could be done from session variable, odd or even of something like that)

The check box is not the only thing the plugin does. Yes, it is always possible that someone will find a way to defeat it, but we’ve had this plugin for a long time and that hasn’t happened yet.

If and when it does Andy will change it. You suggestions are interesting. I’ve saved them and will pass them along to Andy. Commenters are already so used to checking the box that if we started rotating check or uncheck they won’t like it at first – but since the popup can easily remind them and they won’t lose their comment if they don’t notice that is definitely a potential fix should the bot creators manage to find a way to get through.

hey no problem, thanks for replying. I’m sure Andy has loads of much better ideas, just sort of thinking out loud. I use both G.A.S.P & CommentLuv on a few different blogs and am really pleased with both of them.

lol I wrote a comment and notices that even after reading this I made a mistake and didn’t leave an @keyword. Thanks for the great info. I am currently running 3 blogs and been getting sick and tiered of 100+ bot comments. It will make my life much easier thanks so much.

Thanks so much for all the info. Im currently running 3 blogs and I deal with hundreds of bod comments. It gets very annoying. Im not a genius when it comes to computers and programing etc.. but you did a great job teaching.

I’m miffed with Bad Behavior. I just disabled it but want to root it out now having read this. I originally wanted to figure out what I could do to accept a moderated backlink that GASP has listed on my Dashboard which seems fine. I can’t figure out how to do this yet tho. Would appreciate your advice on this!

All of the comments on this post prove how good the GASP plug-in is. You can look at other blogs that are bombarded with comment spam using auto-posting software. I can read everything on here and tell that their comment was related to the topic. This is the same reason I am also wanting to get rid of AKISMET on all of the blogs I have for our clients. Personally, I think it’s rude of AKISMET to block or delete comments by real people. People have taken time out of their busy day to be nice enough to make a comment. That’s totally not cool of AKISMET to accuse them of being a spammer when they are not.

Okay, no check-box is showing up for my comments. Yes, Javascript is enabled. I’m trying to add do_action(‘comment_form’,$post->ID); but I can’t figure out how. My theme doesn’t have the and at all! I’ll copy and paste what I do have. Thanks in advance for the help!

I don’t know what you mean by “My theme doesn’t have the and at all!”. If you need to paste code in the comment form you need to wrap it in [ code ] [ / code ] brackets. Please give some additional information:

What theme are you using?

Did you previously have GASP working (on this theme or another theme)?

Did you make any changes to your GASP settings?

You do know the box won’t show up when you’re logged in? You have to log out of your blog to see it.

If you are still having issues I will have to discuss potential causes with Andy if I can get him – he is pretty busy with the launch of CommentLuv Premium right now.growmap would love you to read ..Top Marketing Blogs on GrowMap Reading List

Hey, this sure sounds good. I think i’ll give it a try on my blog as I’m curious to see if it does a better job than Akismet. Not that Akismet is a bad one by any means but, like you guys have already pointed out, it occasionally lets some nasty comments through.

A lot of people are saying that using a captcha based system is the best solution but they probably aren’t thinking at all at the user experience. I know that it happened a lot of times for me, as a reader not a blog editor, to input the wrong but “not really wrong” answer. Not to mention that some captchas are really hard to decipher. Sheeesh.

It probably won’t block most of the “manual” spammers, I’m not getting my hopes that high up. But if GASP will help me get rid of those damn bots I’ll be really satisfied.

I’ve been using GASP for a while now and it didn’t let any crap through.
I was running akismet on the side but I’ve deleted that and it’s still great.
So much better than akismet.
Way to go!Danny would love you to read ..Remington RM1015P 10-Inch 8 Amp Electric Pole chain Saw

I just learned about GASP today …I wonder would this plug-in work on non-wordpress blogs? I’ve made a “homemade blog” from scratch without using MySQL. However, I can use MySQL if GASP plugin requires it. If it does not support non-wordpress blogs, do you have a suggestion? I haven’t install a commenting module yet and am trying to find out if commentluv/keywordluv supports non-wordpress blogs as well. Thanks!

Comment spammers are hammering my site with offers for SEO and advertising services so hard it’s impossible to moderate the legitimate comments. I’m hoping GASP can stem the tide of crap I’m deleting on a regular basis.

I tried to move the check box above the submit button via comments.php but it’s not moving at all. Can anyone help me with that? I did enclose the code in the php tags.

Also, is there a reason why the check box is not above the submit button by default? The submit button is the last thing a user touches before submitting a comment, so it doesn’t make sense to put a check box below that.

I’d look at your site but you didn’t leave a link. What theme are you using? Did you wait some time between making the change to make sure your caching plugin had not updated yet? I can get you assistance to move it but need more details to diagnose the cause.growmap would love you to read ..Social Media: Why You MUST Specialize

Wow… I’ve been using the Bad Behavior script on a lot of WordPress blogs. I guess I will have to uninstall it and install this new plug-in. I know we were getting bombarded with spam in the past. I also work at a place where I administrate a ton of WordPress blogs. I am going to have to go into each and every one of them, one by one and remove the Bad Behavior script and replace it with the new ones so that we also don’t get locked out. It would also not be good if the Bad Behavior malfunctioned and started blocking out Google or Yahoo from spidering.

Many bloggers successfully use Bad Behavior so if it it working for you it may be fine. GASP is definitely less risky and easier to use though. Some including Andrew Rondeau are still using and recommending it.

What was really challenging for me about Bad Behavior was that I had created multiple Admin accesses in case anything ever happened and ALL of them were locked out! It was very challenging to get it removed and without the experts I know we might have had to completely reload.growmap would love you to read ..Social Media Sharing – How to Make It Fast and Easy

I am thrilled that it is still working so well for me. Yes, I do get many manually entered spam comments that I delete; however, the bots haven’t managed to get in yet. I prefer to get to decide what I consider spam and what I don’t because there really is no consensus among bloggers. Most consider almost all their comments spam – even when they aren’t.growmap would love you to read ..Social Media Analytics, The Book is Live on Amazon.com

This seems like a great plugin idea. Theoretically, it could quickly be adapted to by spam programs, but so can captchas. I hate captchas as some sites have ones that I can never read no matter how many times I refresh it.

Or it could merely not be used widely enough yet to be worth the time investment to defeat it. By the way, the “growmap would love you to read…” I’m assuming that is randomized, but it seems like a personalized way to increase pageviews and time on site. Which plugin does that?

Noticed 22 new spam comments on my wife’s blog today, all within the last 48 hours. Plugin has been working wonders for 6 months, and is still activated. Have you noticed any new spammers that have found a way around it?

Spammers who write comments manually can still leave spam. So far we have not seen any programmers who have managed to get their automated bots to defeat the plugin but we personally delete many spam comments each day.

It could be that your wife’s blog has gotten more visibility or more popular OR that it has ended up on a list sold or shared between spammers. Dofollow blogs are most often added to those lists and that can cause a huge increase in spam. (That is why this plugin exists – because this blog ended up on spam lists and was getting ~1ooo automated spam comments a day.)

Although we think it is easier to just delete the manual spam, you can run Akismet along with GASP but if you do that do remember to rescue the real comments that will end up in the spam folder.growmap would love you to read ..Bloggers: Promote Your Blog Here

Absolutely. This plugin was created by Andy Bailey who is also the genius behind the CommentLuv plugin. There have been no conflicts between this plugin and any others reported so far and WordPress shows 10,318 downloads as of right now.growmap would love you to read ..Small Business Influencer 2011 @SmallBizTrends

It works far better than Akismet. Any time you see the check box in the comments with a variation of “check here if you’re not a spammer” that blog is using G.A.S.P.

Akismet does not block bots so over time blogs fill up with all kinds of obvious spam. This blog was up to ~1,000 spam comments a day and it was taking hours to go through them to find the comments left by our favorite other bloggers who had been flagged incorrectly by Akismet as spammers.

I just mentioned GASP in my new comment policy. I’ve been using it for a few months now after switching from Akismet and must say that it’s done a great job. I have to go check out the trackback plugin, as I do not have that yet.

Thank you for spreading the word. This plugin is important for bloggers and small businesses to retain freedom of speech. Just thinking about those 1,000+ bot comments I was getting every day here reminds me of what a time-saver this plugin is. We have Phil Hollows at FeedBlitz to thank for Andy creating it.

Wise people everywhere need to wake up to the funnel we’re being poured into between Akismet silencing the most active commentators and keeping small businesses from spreading the word about what they have to offer us and the new Chrome block data that is the perfect excuse for not ranking #smallbusiness sites in the serps. I wrote about both in my post on Crowdsourcing.

The new algorithms are creating constant churn on the first page for many searches so they don’t even have to remove businesses from the index to eliminate most of their organic traffic. Most will be happy to land on the first page off and on not realizing they can’t get a consistent amount of traffic. As with all stealth roll-outs and the frog in the pot of water this is being done gradually so most won’t detect it.growmap would love you to read ..Bloggers: Promote Your Blog Here

Whoa! I’ve been hearing about this GASP.. I was even about to recommend it here in this post.. I never knew it stands for GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin, shame on me! 🙁
There are bloggers prefer using GASP than Akismet now. So may be I just wanna say Congrats!

I did not know that Akismet filters out so many real comments. I just checked my spam and sure enough I found a valuable comment in there. This is the first time I heard about an alternative – will install it right now.

While I was apprehensive at 1st to deactivate Akismet I am pleased to report that I have had no spam since I installed GASP & TB Validator. How nice to log in each time & my spam folder always shows zero. I’ve had only 2 spam comments from human spammers which were easy to delete with the trash it link on the notification email. This has proven much more effective than sorting through hundreds of spam comments in akismet to make sure it hasn’t blocked genuine comments as it would often do. I have now uninstalled Akismet completely. Just don’t need it no more.

Thank you for the feedback. I love this plugin. Without it how I handle comments would have HAD to change. How’s the comic business doing? If you ever want to do some promotional blog outreach for your business I’d love to discuss ideas with you.

The GASP/TB Validator is certainly the best thing I have come across. I don’t do comics as a business it’s just a hobby I enjoy. My biggest reward is drawing them & knowing that others enjoy reading them.

GASP has been great on my blogs too, but this blog has caught the attention of the trackback spammers. Sounds like TB Validator is what I need. I suppose that feature would be too hard to incorporate into GASP or is that in the works?

I just found your site, and would like to congratulate you on GASP, it’s a killer plug-in well done.
I have been testing it a while now on one site and am happy to say it works.
It stopped all my spam except for the trackbacks, but now I have visited your site I know what to do about those too.
Incidentally, I do a fair bit of blog/forum posting and I often extol the virtues of GASP, to the many people who repeat parrot-like about how good Akismet is.
Well done with this guys.

I have just been recommended this plugin after reading a post over at lindagraceonline and am in the process of putting it live on my blogs, it looks promising but I read one thing with interest on your post above. You say that this stops bots but not human spammers.

This makes me wonder, I am aware of bots and how they work but what is a human spammer? How could such a thing be cost effective?

Human spammers are actually quite common. You are right that it is not cost effective for spammers selling porn or pills. But most human spammers are just trying to get back links to their spammy sites. If you have a blog like mine that varies in PR from 3 or 4, or for a short time 5, and, like I am, are a dofollow site, then these human spammers WILL spend the time to leave a comment. They can be very tricky too. It is a bit of work, but I always check out the sites of new commentators to make sure they are not spammy. I also do not allow people to use commentator names like “SEO Pro” or “Best Music Apps”. They can use a name or “Anonymous”. I will edit comments sometimes to remove spammy parts or spam links, even if some of the comment is legit and relevant. It is a bit of work, but well worth it. I have developed a community of regular commentators. Also because it is easy to see the comment threads are civil and free of spam, I seem to get a good percentage of new comments from Google and other search engine visitors.

Installing this plugin has really made the job of spam surveillance MUCH easier. I have had no complaints at all from users. Checking the box is easy and the customizable reminder message is great!

The challenge that comes up in any discussion of spam is “what is spam”. Many bloggers are far too delete-happy and are actually driving away real readers who are often other bloggers who are trying to make a living online.

How do you define “spammy”? Commentators need to realize that many bloggers consider any comment from any link to a site that sells anything spam. But is that REALLY true?

Every day I struggle with what to allow and what to delete – knowing full well that I allow far more than most bloggers do (because I understand that real people with real businesses are using comments for links AND to learn from what I write).

While some comments are obvious spam, for many there is no simple black and white line you can draw in many cases. Exactly where I decide to draw those lines will finally end up in a long overdue commenting policy.

I hope more bloggers start realizing that even those who found your blog with the intention of obtaining backlinks are real people – often other bloggers – and many of them DO read your content. Not only that, many of them are social media savvy and will SHARE your content – IF you treat them with respect instead of disdain.

Hi Gail – Yes you are correct that it can be a struggle deciding what is spam. I tend to be quite lenient and thorough but it takes time. I don’t delete a comment just because it is from a business. What I do there is judge the value of the comment. Because commenting for backlinks takes time, many people will leave very short, basically useless comments with a link to their site. Most of the comments I disallow are not really from legit businesses. They are selling pills, porn, etc. Or they are linking back to a site with scraped content. You know those, I’m sure. They often have 10 or 20 new posts per day and if you Google the content you will find the original post on some other site.

I am more strict about not allowing keywords as comment names. It just seems so antisocial. For example here I think it is fine for you to use “Growmap” as your name here as this helps people commenting here know that you are the plugin owner. I think you should use “Gail” , with a link to this site, rather than “Growmap” when commenting on other blogs.

By the way, as an example of what I mean in the first paragraph in this reply. A comment left by you on my site linking to the Growmap plugin would never be edited or deleted. I have a few regular commentators that link back to their business sites. That is perfectly OK with me. If however “John” from “Texas Legal Services” used “Texas Legal Services” instead of “John” as his commentator name, I would change that. If I could not determine his real name I would change it to “Anonymous”. I feel that having a blog with hundreds of commentator names that are really just keywords, cheapens that blog. I have also heard that sites with lots of keyword comments are penalized by Google.

Those kinds you mention are easy to tell as spam and get deleted. The ones that I find challenging are the weak comments from weak sites. They could be noobs (and I don’t want to discourage them from growing) or they could be spammers – it can sometimes be VERY hard to tell.

Since installing this plugin on my site, my spam rate has drastically reduced. I used to think that there was no better alternativ to Akismet but boy oh boy GASP superseded my expectations and I’m so glad you came up with it..

I have just installed GASP & also installed the TB validation plugin. I also “turned off Akismet” (Shudder, that just felt like such an unatural thing to do) OK Gasp I am fully in your care so lets see what happens. I used GASP on a previous blog but still had Akismet turned on & didn’t have the TBV plugin so hope it will all be good

You will be quite surprised how individual bloggers define spam. See my Spam or Not Spam Survey to see what I mean.

Most bloggers will not notice that Akismet is blocking many of their very best comments until one of their regular commentators starts asking where their comments are OR is aware of the Akismet issue and tells them this plugin is the fix.

If you are logged in you won’t see it. I dropped by your blog and don’t see the check box so maybe it is not working. If you use Skype or Yahoo IM use the contact info on my contact tab to connect with me and we’ll see if we can determine why it isn’t working for you.

The only issues any bloggers have had so far had to do with problems in their specific theme.

I love GASP! I installed it a few months ago and it immediately stopped ALL the spam comments from coming through.
HOWEVER…this past week I’ve started to get a bunch of spam comments on both of my main WordPress sites. There have been several each day, and it seems like it’s going to get worse. I’m guessing that someone has found a way to get around the protection mechanism.
Anyone else experiencing a sudden change, and the reappearance of spam comments? I’m not sure what to do. I’m manually deleting these right now, but concerned about how bad this will get.
If it would help, I can share links and even admin access to my WP sites with someone for troubleshooting or analysis.
Eric Bobrow

There are trackbacks that look like spam comments – we block those with the other plugin mentioned in this post. Neither GASP nor that plugin block live people who can check the box. Repeat spammers can be blocked using the blacklist built into WordPress. Details above.

When you get popular spam does increase but manual spammers can’t leave 1000+ a day the way bots can. Crowdsourcing the way Akismet does it will NEVER work because bloggers who have no idea how it affects others flag non-spam as spam causing real commentators to be blackballed.

An Akismet-like system that used only those who know what they’re doing could work, but I don’t expect we’ll see Automattic do that because I believe they want to blacklist the most influential bloggers on purpose to reduce their influence.

Thanks for adding the link to my PHP GASP article. One slight problem, when I click on the link I go to a completely different article on my site! The link should be…http://dougneubauer.com/2010/12/php-g-a-s-p-for-wordpress/
The link you have as an extra ‘c’ at the end which I guess must somehow confuse WordPress.

I deleted Akismet from all my blogs and most bloggers use GASP instead of Akismet, but it will work with it and a few do use both. The good news for those who choose to use both is that at least you can much more easily find the real comments because GASP blocks the majority of spam which turns out to be bot-spam in most blogs.

For a total spam solution read the details on this page. We use GASP plus a trackback blocker for trackback spam that looks like comments but are really trackbacks plus the blacklist function built into WordPress to deal with repeat manual spammers.

Thank you for letting me know, Christopher. I am posting your addtional details on the conflict with WP Minify here so that they can be found easily online and for future reference:

It would seem that it is not GASP at fault, as I have just been testing to see if there was a confliction between any other plugins, and it turns out that when I disable “WP Minify” GASP appears to work fine 🙂

The plugin blocks BOTS not human spammers. If you have a problem with comments that look like comments but are actually trackback spam see Justin Germino’s post about the plugin we’re all using to block trackback spam.

Manually created spam can be blocked by WordPress by adding the url, email address or words to the blacklist function built into WordPress. Log into WordPress and go to Settings > Discussion > Comment Blacklist and type or paste what you want to blacklist into that box.

Comments captured by the blacklist go to the spam section of your comments.

NOTE: “When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be marked as spam. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”.”

Be careful not to block comments containing words that have parts of other words within them and do check your spam folder and rescue good comments. If you realize you’re blocking a word you can edit the blacklist.

The plugin has got some room for improvements though:
1. The “Confirm you are not a spammer” text should go inside of a label element, associated with the checkbox through the for attribute. This makes the click area bigger, since you will also be able to click on the label to check/uncheck the box –

Confirm you are NOT a spammer

I would also try to stay away from inline styles, but instead have these applied in a stylesheet of my choice.

2. I don’t know if this is even possible, but not being able to comment when javascript is disabled is a bit of a turnoff. If I’m not able to make a comment without javascript (some mobile browsers don’t run javascript for instance), there is no use in being able to fill out the comment form in the first place. I guess this could be solved by either stating (above the form) clearly that you won’t be able to comment without javascript, or by not showing the form at all in the first place.

Did you see the php version I added to the body of the post and also the instructions for how to move the check box? I numbered the items on this page to make them easier to find and suggest to others. The java php version is at #4 and how to move the check box is #5.

This looks like a really simply solution to stop those damn automated posters (why do people even bother with that?). My wordpress blog has been getting absolutely hammered at the moment so it is time consuming to weed through and pick out the odd genuine post.

What a strange business concept these people have …Oh well, there are so many other anti-spam plugins out there and I always leave a message on askimet infested blogs to warn them about their deficient anti-spam protection.

Fantastic – I can’t wait to see how this works – just installed it now. It has been awhile since I’ve been by but I remember all the activity and dialogue you had about Akismet. Since I don’t get the chance to blog much I don’t have a big following but I do have a rather large following of spammers. 🙂 It will be nice to see how this plug-in handles them. Right now I am using a custom theme based on the free Box-Tube theme so we’ll see how the compatibility goes. (although I am in the process of redoing the design using the twentyten theme because boxtube has a conflict with WP 3).

I did just notice that I may have to figure out how to move the checkbox, or perhaps style the text differently because it blends in too much on my contact form – we’ll see how it goes. 🙂

I don’t know if my GASP plugin broke or the spammers just found a way through it, but for the first few weeks of using GASP, I saw only a handful of spam comments every day. Now I have received about a 100 over the past two days – that’s almost as many as before I was using GASP.

I think I found out what was wrong – the spam comments that made it through might have been trackbacks. I’m not sure, but installing the simple trackback validation plugin catches most of them, if not all.

It seems that your topic is very interesting to all of us as readers. Akismet plug-in is useful to filter spammers yet it isn’t quite the very effective and reliable. It is more advisable to all moderators/admin to be active on their blogs to remove spammers and get an active exchanging of discussion. I think you really did a good and pretty blog sharing! Thanks! 🙂

The problem with doing it that way is the same issue bloggers who use captcha or math plugins run into. If the cookie gets corrupted most Internet users don’t think to delete it and they are blocked from commenting.

Checking a box only takes a second and ensures that you can comment. Compared to the huge number of regular commentators that Akismet has blocked this is a joy for commentators.

And compared to the dozens, hundreds or thousands of spambot comments that Akismet allows through, this plugin makes blogging a joy again. Logging in to 1000+ spam comments every day is disheartening to say the least.

Thanks for the reply. I understanding the reasoning behind it. And, the cookie side as well.

Still a little concerned over the regular commentators getting annoyed. I’m tracking spam comments now via ip. If that fails I’ll give your plugin a go, and change the message a little. Hopefully people will understand.

Honestly we haven’t seen any complaints from commentators anywhere, but that is always a possibility. My readers here are mostly bloggers or those who want to be bloggers so they are familiar with the Akismet and commenting issues.

The problem with using IP addresses is twofold:

1) Many ISPs still dynamically assign IP addresses so each Internet user has a different one each time. That means you are likely to block innocent others and not block the intended target.

2) The best spammers have a way of generating a different IP address for each comment which are probably not their IP addresses at all.

I do that too. Most bloggers use Zemanta correctly, but for a while there I was getting a ton of Zemanta links from blogs with very short posts and dozens of non-related links. Maybe Zemanta acted on my suggestion that they limit how many links we can include in a post? Or maybe I deleted so many they took me off their target list.

Many bloggers may not be aware that there are people who sell lists of dofollow blogs that approve links. Link builders buy them and that can greatly increase your comment spam for a while.

Interesting, I’ve never questioned akismet before. Typically our site gets thousands of spam comments daily, over 30 pages, and I do not even browse through them any more due to lack of time, I just hit the “empty” button. I wonder if perhaps I have been blocking some legitimate comments.

Almost all of that spam is left by bots. I guarantee you have deleted tons of real commments because over time more and more quality commentators have been flagged by Akismet as spammers.

It makes no sense to have Akismet letting through all that bot spam. It is so much more pleasant to log in and see only 10-50+ real comments instead of having to slog through 1000s of spam comments to rescue the real ones.

We don’t use any other anti-spam plugins with GASP and definitely got rid of Akismet. Bloggers who get a lot of trackback spam but don’t want to block all trackbacks use a separate plugin to manage that.

As someone who uses multiple blogs and sets blog websites up for others, this product so far has been fantastic. I am implimenting it slowly from site to site to be sure it doesnt conflict with any existing WordPress custom plugins. So far so good, very impressed with the product.

[Added keywords to let my readers know what you do and to give your business a stronger backlink.]

I’ve made a few comments here but somehow I’ve been flagged as spam. Akismet definitely has a mind of its own and after using it for so long, I’ve finally decided to give the kick on that plugin. Never to see it ever again. If I don’t go through my spam, a lot of legitimate comments will never see the light of day and I suspect most of mine also. Using the GASP plugin now to get rid of spam and Simplet TrackBack Validation to get rid of Spam Trackbacks too.

If your comments don’t appear immediately now it should only be because you haven’t commented using that specific name and keywords before. Once one is approved the rest should automatically be approved (unless you happen to be in my manual blacklist but that would be unlikely).

First verify that the plugin is still active as one person has problems with it getting disabled for some reason he can’t explain. Then consider that those are probably NOT automated spam. They are most likely copied and pasted by live humans.

G.A.S.P. only blocks spambots – not real people who can check the box. We will always have some spam but GASP blocks 99% of the spam I was getting – and with 1000+ spam a day this blog is representative of the worst of it.

Unlike some folks, the plug-in is always activated so I’m guessing there’s no plugin conflict now. I don’t think they were copied and pasted by live humans because they NEVER had left an email address with their “comments” and wordpress by default doesn’t accept those kind of comments unless they are trackbacks. Thus I’m kinda guessing that they took advantage of the upgrade that allowed all trackbacks to spam my blog.

A few days ago I deactivated trackbacks and the spam stopped. I just installed the Simple Trackback Validation plugin and then reactivated trackbacks to see what happens. Hopefully the spam will stay out NOW.

Udegbunam, I should consider myself lucky because, I’ve never had this experience with trackbacks. All of the trackbacks I get (since installing GASP) are one’s that I generate myself when I submit posts to Blog Engage or BizSugar.

I’d like to hear more about this so I can be on the lookout, because right now I prefer to see the trackbacks (I disabled a plugin that I was using to stop them).

Trackbacks look very different from spam comments so it didn’t occur to me that was what you were seeing. Blogs that are ecommerce related get more trackback spam. I get almost none of it in this blog but quite a bit of it in our JV gift blog and golf blog.

Lately some people have been using something called pingbacker to get a ton of phony links (not visible on their blog but visible in view source) and others use Zemanta incorrectly to put too many unrelated links at the bottom of their posts.

It probably didn’t hurt the WP install but it definitely locked us all out and if I did not know some extremely talented programmers we might not have been able to delete all the individual files it created that kept us locked out even after we deleted the plugin itself via ftp.

I came across blog posts indicating that other bloggers reinstalled WordPress and lost all their content when the same thing happened to them because they didn’t know anyone like Sammy who does custom WordPress or Derek who does Thesis skins or Imran who loves to improve blog load speed.

Hi Gail, as you know I really love having this plugin and GASP is a huge time saver. I do have a question though, I’m not seeing any trackbacks or pingbacks since I installed it and I’m wondering if it’s possible to get those to display again. When I submit my posts to sites like Blog Engage or Biz Sugar, I’d like for those trackbacks to appear in the comment section. Let me know what your thoughts are. Do others have this same experience?

It was my understanding that the plugin only blocks comments and not trackbacks or pingbacks. I tweeted your comment to Andy for confirmation but I have not heard back from him yet.

I did check and I haven’t seen any trackbacks or pingbacks that I would have expected to see so you could be right. We’ll see what Andy has to say. I know some bloggers like to block those but that wasn’t my plan and I didn’t realize it until you asked.

Like you I do usually approve quality trackbacks/pingbacks. I know why some bloggers delete them though because people have been incorrectly using Zemanta or using Pingbacker to spam my ExecGifts gift blog lately.

Thank you for taking the time to let us know. We do our best to return the favor to all our visitors (sometimes by commenting, often by sharing their content, sometimes with reviews on StumbleUpon and always by following them on Twitter.

You can imagine how grateful we are for this plugin – we manage over a dozen blogs and since they’re all dofollow and almost all have CommentLuv the spammers LOVE us!

We want to be business and blogger friendly but not be flooded with spam!

You could make a contact form on this post and ask people to submit their blog if they use GASP.
Since we’re talking about lists, what are the SEO ramifications, if any, of having a slew of unrelated blog links on a single post? Is it treated like a blog roll in the eyes of the Search Engines? Is it viewed as a link farm?

If having such a list on your domain is problematic, please email me, as I have a suggestion.

The DoFollow directory is a good idea.
Why do you want this list, though?
If it is to publicize GASP, have you thought about a Facebook Fan Page? I know everybody isn’t on there, but the exposure could be huge.

I may have to check out GASP as I am always looking at ways to fight spam. Currently I use three plugins that seem to work great, but maybe GASP is a better solution.

As a side note, I currently use Bad Behavior on about 6 blogs, and never had a single issue with logging into any of the blogs. I am surprised that you had an issue. The only thing I can think of is that you had something installed in your browser that was being blocked by Bad Behavior.

What many bloggers are missing is that if you only consider what plugins block spam without worrying about how we’re treating our real commentators many plugins work – but what about those real people we are slamming the door on?

THAT is the main reason this plugin exists – because we and other bloggers are unwilling to continue to allow plugins to treat our commentators rudely.

I don’t know why Bad Behavior locked us all out but it couldn’t be a browser issue because it affected four different people in different countries using different browsers and operating systems. None of us could get in or even see this blog.

I know many bloggers who use and recommend Bad Behavior including Barbara Swafford at Blogging Without A Blog and Andrew Rondeau who recommend is in his Blogging Course that I recommend.

What it is about this blog that made it lock us all out is undetermined, but the potential consequences for bloggers who are not as fortunate to know so many top WordPress experts are very serious. Some have actually had to reinstall their blogs to recover – and not every blogger has a brilliant WordPress Ninja doing daily backups for them the way we do.

Yes, this is it exactly. I recently stopped by the blog of a popular software tool I use to leave a bunch of _compliments_ for the guys on their most recent enhancements. I wrote up a nice paragraph or two, did the little anti-spam math problem and hit submit. The thing kept telling me my math answer was wrong and wouldn’t let me post! Sorry, but 2+3 _does_ equal 5! What’s worse, each time, it deleted my comment, my name, my URL, etc., so I had to start over from scratch. Needless to say, after the 3rd time, I gave up. This is what we want to avoid.

You have precisely described the reason we removed the math plugin. By the way, the “fix” for that is usually to delete your cookies but if experienced bloggers do not know that what are the chances those trying to leave a comment know – or want to be bothered with deleting cookies?

Well, I’ve had it in place for about a week now, and so far, so good. I used to use Akismet, and it did a good job of capturing the spam, but then I felt obligated to at least page through it and make sure no valid comments had been caught, because every so often, they were.

Now it’s so wonderful to look in my comments admin area, and see “Spam (0)”–nothing for me to check! I’ve not noticed any bumps with the Headway theme, either, and I’ve also got ComLuv and KeywordLuv hooked up, and everyone’s playing nice together.

Thank you so much for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback. Now bloggers using the Headway theme will be more confident about using this plugin.

We use Thesis, CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and many other plugins in all of our blogs and have seen no conflicts with any plugins in any of them and have had no reports of conflicts with any plugins at all so far.

I’ve already installed GASP on my 2 blogs, and I’ll be installing this plugin to more of my upcoming blogs 🙂

Thanks for emailing me this plugin Gail! And congratulations, all of your hard work to improve and help the community is very much appreciated on this side, knowing that I’m one of those who have been abused by Akismet for a long time.